Potentially Interesting New Book by Eric Hedin

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Nope. I’m presenting facts as facts. Denton’s books contain evidence for fine-tuning. I did not say proof, and I did not say that the evidence would persuade everyone. I said they presented evidence. That they present evidence (however unconvincing the evidence might be to some) is fact, not opinion. That the prosecutor presented evidence that O. J. did it, is fact, not opinion. Whether the evidence is convincing is another matter entirely.

If you think it is not fact, the onus is on you, not me, to show that in all those hundreds of pages not a single statement about nature counts as evidence at all, not even weak evidence. You won’t be able to do that, though, until you have read all those pages and shown that not a single point of the thousands of points made constitutes evidence. Go to it.

Until then, your grades in Epistemology 101 and Textual Exegesis 100 remain as they were before: F.

Boy, I would love to have been a prof or teaching assistant grading the papers, in elective courses, of some of the science-trained people here. As Mr. Spock would say, the “torrent of illogic” in the essays on philosophy, religion, politics, English literature, sociology, etc. would have been most amusing to observe, and it would be among the most worthwhile expenditures of red ink to comment in detail on them.

Oh, wait, I forgot: almost none of the atheist scientists posting here ever took any university courses in philosophy, religion, English, history, Classics, political theory, etc. So I guess the scenario I’m thinking about would be purely hypothetical.

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But he is being paid by taxpayers for it, in a publicly funded university. And you can’t back out for your support now that you’ve heard that, unless you also say that courses like Hedin’s which have the opposite emphasis must not be taught in a public university. Which of course, they are, including at Hedin’s own university. See False Spin: Ball State University Misrepresents Anti-Religious Chapters in What Is Your Dangerous Idea? as Religion-Friendly | Evolution News.

And Ball State is not alone. Almost every university I have studied at or taught at has been a publicly funded one, and anti-religious thought, whether conveyed crudely or subtly, is quite frequently presented. I can vouch for the existence of this bias in many departments in which I have had close involvement, including religion and philosophy departments among others. I was once interviewed by a deconstructionist atheist Marxist in an allegedly “neutral” state-funded religion department, a teacher who had for years intimidated and belittled Christian students (as the students themselves told me); he spent his whole career promoting the idea that religion was delusion, rubbish, etc., that students who studied religion in a university setting should not be asking whether or not any of the religious traditions they study are true (because none of them are true) but should spend all their time “deconstructing” religious belief and religious institutions, and that what the world needed was wised-up deconstructionist nihilism. (Though incoherently, one with a Marxist tinge, as if Marxism itself wasn’t a metaphysical position that could be “deconstructed” as easily as Christianity, etc.) Hardly a metaphysically or theologically neutral position. But public universities are crawling with people like that in the Arts departments (and from what I can see, there are some in the science departments as well).

Hector Avalos, the stridently atheist professor of religious studies at Iowa State, another public university, is another case in point. If Hedin shouldn’t have been allowed to teach at Ball State because it was public rather than private, then why wasn’t Jerry Coyne launching a campaign to get Avalos removed from the religion department at Iowa State, on the grounds that a professor shouldn’t be either promoting or undermining religious faith in a state institution? I think it’s pretty obvious that Coyne’s allegedly “constitutional” concerns are pretty much a mask for his ideological agenda. Fortunately, Moran and Myers (both of whom teach at publicly funded schools) stated a more principled position than Coyne’s. They understand what academic freedom is about, and that even in public universities it must be protected. Coyne thinks it should be protected only in the case of views he agrees with.

That’s like saying you won’t accept the validity of a mathematical proof until you see an example. The proof is valid if it’s formally correct, and no examples should be needed to one who understands mathematics. The point is that it’s possible in principle to know that something is designed without knowing who was its designer. You would grant that point, if a pyramid on Mars were found. You would not argue that, since we cannot determine who the designer was, and since we have no evidence that any other intelligent race exists (other than the pyramid itself), we are forced to conclude that the pyramid must have been produced by freak accidents, blind unguided natural laws, earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid strikes or whatever. You would grant that the structure was produced by an unknown intelligent agent. It would be dialogically decent of you to admit this.

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This thread has followed predictable outcomes and has lost meaningful discussion. I will be approving a few posts that aren’t squabbling and closing the rest down.

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No it isn’t. First of all there’s no “proof” involved in your hypothetical inference, and I’m telling you we’ve had this discussion before because we had, and I agreed that there is some circumstance under which I would infer design.

But I also greatly elaborated on how and why, and that to infer design I need to have some sort of idea about the capacities of the designer, in the context of how I understand the world to work. What does “design” actually mean and entail?

It doesn’t make sense to postulate something as an “explanation” if it is vacuous. To posit that something was designed and have it succeed as an explanation must be to actually explain how something was made. If I tell you the pyramids were designed you’re still going to ask how, and until I answer that question I haven’t really explained how the pyramids came to be. So how did humans build the pyramids? Only when you elaborate on that have you explained the pyramids with “design”. A design explanation cannot amount merely to “it was designed” any more than an evolutionary explanation can amount to “it evolved”. You’ve of course stated as much numerous times before. It’s not enough to just say that the flagellum evolved, you want more details. Okay, but how? Give me some detail here.

I don’t have to know what every worker had for breakfast, or how often they stubbed their toes (there is some sense in which I can basically extrapolate the rest from a handful of details), but how did they get those stones up there, at the very least? And where did they get them?

A pyramid on mars would entail either that we’ve got the history of human civilization and technology massively wrong, or that there was at some point an alien civilization not that much different from humans (with the capacity to mine, work, and transport rocks and resources), living on Mars.

But we don’t have pyramids on Mars, and we have nothing even remotely like it in biology. And we’ve never been given an actual design explanation that amounts to anything more than copy-pasting the word itself.

So, call me when you do.

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A footnote to my other remarks: I would not expect most current-day philosophy professors to accept a teleological view. I’d be happy if they were objective enough to acknowledge that excluding teleological explanation is a metaphysical and/or epistemological decision, not necessitated by the notion of “science”; we know as a matter of historical fact, that forms of natural science have existed that accepted teleology (Greek, Medieval). As long as science graduates don’t come out saying (or believing, even if they don’t say it out loud) asinine things like “Science has proved there is no teleology in nature,” I have no problem with scientists doing their routine, non-teleological thing. It’s the engagement of a certain type of scientist – militantly atheist/materialist – in cultural controversies, invoking the name of “science” to justify their particular metaphysics/theology/antitheology, that I object to. The quite little atheist scientist who does non-teleological study of nature, doesn’t make any grand metaphysical claims for “science,” and stays away from culture-war activity against religious belief, I would never dream of bothering.

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Einstein showed brilliantly that the Ether is not testable by physical means.

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